Thursday, September 12, 2013

A family member back from a Japan adventure was kind enough to oblige my request for photos of street scenes during her travels. Although you can easily get your Japanese narrow streets fix at Nathan Lewis' site, or even on Google Streetview, which now covers most of Japan, I thought I might share of few of them:

Asakusa District, Tokyo

Although many streets are effectively pedestrianized like this one, with little auto traffic, few if any are actually physically closed off to cars. On-street parking is almost nonexistent. Almost all bikes seem to be of the cruiser type at left, with high handlebars, comfy seats and a basket almost invariably attached in the front (and often the back as well). Helmets? Very few if any are worn, apparently.

Kyoto

Arcade-style public shopping streets, running for block after block, are abundant. In Kyoto, it appears a person could walk across much of the downtown area without leaving the shelter of one of these covered streets. Despite the near-total lack of nearby parking, the visual evidence shows that these streets aren't suffering from a dire lack of customers. I expected to find a website devoted to them, but that seems to be a project still in search of a creator.

Saturday, September 7, 2013

In its recent endorsement in the
New York City mayoral race for sudden frontrunner Bill de Blasio, StreetsPAC cited de Blasio's street safety platform calling for "a city with
zero fatalities or serious injuries caused by car crashes on the streets
of New York." In addition to various law enforcement measures,
including speed limit reductions, de Blasio's platform also calls for
design-based changes, including "narrowing excessively wide streets that
encourage reckless passing and speeding, widening sidewalks and medians
to make streets easier and safer to cross, and adding dedicated bicycle
infrastructure to create a safe space for New Yorkers on
bikes."

Under Mayor
Bloomberg, numerous design interventions of this sort have been carried
out, and although some redesigns have brought significant
transformations -- Times Square, for example, or the reworking of Grand
Army Plaza in Brooklyn -- others have been little more than glorified
patch jobs, taking common-sense but modest steps to address notoriously dangerous
crossings and intersections without unduly interfering with the primacy
of high-speed automobile circulation. While there has been abundant use
of colorful paint to widen sidewalks and expand pedestrian plazas, and
the wonderful addition of bike-sharing and new bike lanes, few streets
have seen thorough overhauls that are consciously geared toward
improving quality of life for those on foot rather than simply enhancing safety and
mobility.

Incremental changes make sense as
a general rule, but in a city like New York, surely there is
room, and appetite, for at least one transformational street project? However, certain major changes, such as wide-scale permanent pedestrianizations, have generally fallen out of favor since the 1970s, while
the imaginations of some planners and architects can get carried away in impractical, overly-complex or even
fantastical directions when presented with a large blank canvas to work
on, as in the case of this fanciful example from last year's Greatest Grid exhibit, showing a Manhattan street repurposed for
agriculture:

A more realistic plan is the "Yorkville Rambla," developed by John Massengale and Dover, Kohl & Partners, which would essentially pedestrianize the center
lanes of Second Avenue. The plan is simple, elegant, and most importantly, draws
on established design predecent shown to be successful in similar urban
contexts. The design does not contemplate a complete pedestrianization,
but on New York's avenues, due to the need for dedicated bus and bike
lanes, this is not likely to be feasible:

The plan pays homage to Barcelona's renowned thoroughfare, but there are in
fact successful examples from New York itself very similar to the proposed design. Here, for example, is Dag Hammarskjold Plaza, a city park nearby the United Nations complex which was
completely reconstructed in the late 1990s. Although it is classified as
a park, and is administered by the city's parks department, rather than the transportation department, when viewed in context of the adjacent 47th Street, it is clear that the so-called plaza is actually a classic
urban promenade:

The plaza looking west, with 47th Street at right. Source: Old Urbanist

Its design is brilliantly
simple in my opinion, incorporating a few basic principles:

Pave, pave, pave. The surface of the promenade is largely covered with
functional brick and stone pavers, minimizing maintenance while maximizing the
area for human use (which includes weekly farmers' markets). There are
few if any concessions to "green" or "landscape" urbanism: no berms, no
bioswales, no stormwater filtration areas, and half the right of way is not given over to
indigenous grasses or drought-resistant
shrubs (there is, however, an adjacent garden, to the far left in the photo, although this is not integral to the design).

People-oriented seating. Bench
seating is simple and faces toward the promenade, not away from it or in random orientations. If
"what attracts people most ... is other people," in William Whyte's words, this straightforward design is a great
success.

Green to the eye, not
green on the ground. During summer, the promenade is luxuriantly
green to due an abundance of trees (planted regularly and formally, not
pseudo-naturalistically). However, these trees take up very little
space at ground level, minimally interfering with use of the space. For me, this is the true mark of a successful green area ratio:
maximizing visible greenery while minimizing the street-level square
footage actually occupied by that
greenery. Planted areas can enliven a very large space, but this should be done with care, and with thought given to what sort of use the space is likely to receive.

Another promising and perhaps even more feasible plan would restore Park Avenue approximately to its early 20th century configuration by widening its median, although the plan by SHoP shown here does put a lot of unusable green space on the ground:

This seemingly High Line-inspired use of plants to restrict the area available for human use (without adding much visual green -- note the ratio of visual tree area to plant area of about 5:1, though the plant area probably occupies 100x the ground area) seems to be characteristic of many contemporary plans, including one by SOM for the elevated roadways around Grand Central. If that is the cost of deriving political will and public support from the High Line's success, though, then it may be an acceptable trade-off after all.

Whatever the plans of the next mayoral administration, whether led by de Blasio or another candidate, one hopes that at least one street redesign such as these makes it onto the agenda. For a relatively modest cost, the benefits not only in safety but in quality of life would be substantial.

Related posts:

Recivilization also features the Yorkville Rambla at a post here, and outlines a set of very similar principles (which I didn't see until after writing this -- showing that there may possibly be something to them!).

At Strong Towns, Steve Stofka provides a thorough post on street design and the perception of street width, using the addictive new program Streetmix.